Boston Pops to honor Bernstein with season-long appreciation

Jody Feinberg The Patriot Ledger

Sunday

May 6, 2018 at 11:38 AM

Although the Boston Pops won’t play happy birthday, it will give a 100th birthday gift to Leonard Bernstein and the audiences at Symphony Hall. The orchestra celebrates the legendary composer and conductor in nearly every performance this season, performing his music for Broadway, film and dance, as well as his classical works.

“Maybe we sometimes pay too much attention to anniversaries, but this one is seminal in terms of his influence on American musicians,” said Pops conductor Keith Lockhart. “All of us who grew up in the later part of the 20th century had this vision that there finally was an American conductor we wanted to be like. He was perhaps most celebrated as a conductor, but he also had an amazingly diverse career and extraordinarily broad appeal.”

Celebrations are taking place not just in Boston, where Bernstein conducted both the Pops and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, but around the world. Lockhart said he has gone to celebrations in Japan, Norway and Paraguay.

From May 9 – June 16, the Pops will dedicate five of its 27 performances entirely to Bernstein repertoire and will be joined by vocalists. These Bernstein Tribute concerts will have music from “West Side Story,” “On the Town,” and two other Broadway shows, from the ballet “Fancy Free” and the film “On the Waterfront,” excerpts from his Mass, opera Candide and other classical works.

It’s fair to speculate that Bernstein would be delighted at this honoring by the Pops, with which he had his professional conducting debut at the Hatch Shell in 1941 at age 22.

“To me in those days the Pops was heaven itself,” he told a Pops audience when he conducted the orchestra in Symphony Hall decades later. “I thought it was the supreme achievement of the human race.”

Other all-Bernstein programs this season are concert presentations of “West Side Story” with singers and “On the Town” with singers, dancers and full choreography by Tony Award winner Kathleen Marshall.

“We’re celebrating the eclecticism of his talent,” Lockhart said.

As a conductor, Lockhart particularly admires the ways Bernstein inhabited the mind of each composer and brought his unique interpretation.

“He was full of musical personality, and when you listened you could always tell if he was conducting,” Lockhart said. “Even if I didn’t agree with his interpretation, I always found it interesting.”

Of the four matinees (with half-price for ages 17 and under), Lockhart is particularly excited about the two performances of Disney’s Broadway Hits, created by the Disney Company to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the first Disney musical on Broadway. Composers include Alan Menken, Elton John, Phil Collins, Tim Rice and Richard and Robert Sherman.

“I conducted the world premier (of Disney’s Broadway Hits) with the Disney folk in Royal Albert Hall in London, and it was spectacular with an incredible cast,” he said.

The other matinees are "Dance to the Movies" and "West Side Story in Concert." The dance program stars dancers and singers from "Dancing with the Stars," "So You Think You Can Dance" and "American Idol." As in past years, John Williams Film Night and the Boston Pops Gospel Choir returns.

For the centennial, the Pops also created the website www.celebratebernstein.org for people to learn more about Bernstein.

Reach Jody Feinberg at jfeinber@ledger.com. Follow her on Twitter @JodyF_Ledger